httR by Hadley #rstats

The awesome Hadley Wickham has just released the next version of httr package. Prof Hadley is currently on leave from Rice Univ and working with the tremendous geeks at R Studio . New things in the httr package-

httr, a package designed to make it easy to work with web APIs. Httr is a wrapper around RCurl, and provides:

functions for the most important http verbs: GET, HEAD, PATCH, PUT, DELETE and POST.

support for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0. Use oauth1.0_token and oauth2.0_token to get user tokens, and sign_oauth1.0 and sign_oauth2.0to sign requests. The demos directory has six demos of using OAuth: three for 1.0 (linkedin, twitter and vimeo) and three for 2.0 (facebook, github, google).

I especially like the OAuth functionality as I occasionaly got flummoxed with existing R OAuth packages , and this should hopefully lead to awesome new social media analytics posts by the larger R blogger community. Also given the fact that unauthenticated API requests to Twitter are greatly expanded by OAuth authenticated requests- (see https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting )

Unauthenticated calls are permitted 150 requests per hour. Unauthenticated calls are measured against the public facing IP of the server or device making the request.

OAuth calls are permitted 350 requests per hour and are measured against the oauth_token used in the request.

some creative use cases should see an incredible amount of cross social media analysis (not just one social media channel ) at a time.